


The Hanging Rock

by cherii



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball, Red Dead Redemption
Genre: Cowboys and stuff, Gen, Wild West
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-11-20
Updated: 2012-11-20
Packaged: 2017-11-19 03:22:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/568534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherii/pseuds/cherii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a cannibal on the loose and Daiki Aomine is here to save the day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hanging Rock

**Author's Note:**

> Idea sparked from Red Dead Redemption's American Appetites.

It's just like the first one he'd heard, the one where the kid went wandering up to the Hanging Rock and never came back. Or the second where the wife went there to pick mushrooms but was never found. He went up there twice, and twice he was met with the same thing: a pool of blood, a shoe and a severed body part. For the boy it was a bone, the woman an arm.

Daiki listens to the woman who cries and tells him about her husband who went to Hanging Rock, and just like the little boy and the wife, he never came home. When she’s finished complaining about the incompetency of the sheriff and his deputies, Daiki places one hand on her shoulder, assuring her that he’ll try and bring her husband home, even though he already has an inkling of the man’s unfortunate fate.

He straddles his horse and rides to his destination. He’s not quite sure why he’s doing this the third time; poor man’s probably dead, eaten perhaps. Probably shouldn’t have gone up that wretched hill, it’s not as if there aren’t already rumours about it. Or perhaps people are just too fucking arrogant and too fucking sure of themselves. Daiki should know; he’d been like that once. A long time ago.

Hanging Rock is only a short distance away from Armadillo but Daiki likes taking his journeys slow—no point in going too fast either since the man’s going to be dead, and he’s going to stay dead. So when he reaches the same spot where he found the two piles of blood, the sun is already setting.

Only this time, Daiki does a double take, surprised to see a man standing in the middle of the field, screaming about his leg, his clothes bloodied and there’s an ugly wound on his knees. Daiki gets off his horse.

“You alright there, sir?” Daiki asks the man once he’s near enough, a hand on his revolver because you never know what might happen.

The stranger looks up to him, and Daiki notices the wild look in his eyes but brushes it off, thinking it’s probably from all that blood escaping his knee. “Some city fella just attacked me and broke my leg.”

Daiki narrows his eyes and lights a fag held between his lips. “What?”

“My leg, mister. Guy attacked me. Was a little creepy on me, then he got violent,” the stranger says between pants, still holding onto his leg.

“When?”

“Just now, mister.” And he points in the general direction of front. Daiki scans the area but can’t see anything other than grass, grass and more grass.

He adjusts his hat. “I’ll get you for him, mister.” He’s not sure why he said that, since he made a point to not bother himself with someone else’s business; then again he’s not sure why he agreed to help out the poor mother or the two widows either. He could have slept easy by doing nothing. But he didn’t and he sure isn’t going to start acting all indifferent to a stranger’s plight now.

The thing is, the guy didn’t travel that far—he couldn’t even if he wanted to, since the fool’s hurt and limping—but the reason Daiki didn’t see him the first time was because he didn’t look hard enough. He’s a hard man to spot: tiny-sized, pale hair and paler face despite the sun and blistering heat, making damn well easy for him to hide in the bushes. Daiki would have missed him if he didn’t have exceptional vision and hearing, a light rustle is enough to catch his attention and expose the man. A quick swing of his lasso soon brings the man to Daiki’s feet, where he carefully hogties him before throwing the man across his shoulder.

“Let me go, please, _let me go_. You don’t know what you’re doing.” Odd thing is, for a man who had been captured while he escaped, and for a man who’s begging for mercy, the fool’s strangely calm. Daiki ignores his pleas.

“Just shut up before I blow your head off.” Daiki tells him gruffly. He throws the man onto the ground, by the stranger’s feet.

The laugh that follows is an unsettling one; too high-pitched, too maniacal. It reminds Daiki of his father; the same father who killed his mother before shoving the barrel of a shotgun down his throat.

Should have known something was off.

“You just brought me to a cannibal,” the runaway tells him. Daiki’s not sure if his cool disposition scares him more than the stranger’s laugh.

“What?” He stares at the stranger who has a hand to his stomach. He crinkles a smile at Daiki’s direction.

“A man’s gotta eat when a man’s gotta eat,” he tells Daiki, “a man’s gotta eat.”

Daiki holds up his hands, taking a step back. No way in fucking hell is he getting into this. Cannibalism and all that. For a moment there, he truly believed that the rumours were just that. The missing people he thought were kidnapped and the bone and severed arm he thought were results of a coyote attack.

Boy, was he wrong.

Daiki turns back to his horse, and he hears one final croak, last words of desperation.

“Please, _help.”_

He freezes before everything happens too fast. Daiki whips out his revolver, aims and pulls the trigger. There’s a hole in the cannibal’s head as blood and brain splatter everywhere. The man falls sideways, dead as a doornail.

He stands over the man who is still tied up, his large frame shadowing the guy from the sun. “How are we doing, mister?”

“Alive,” he replies curtly. The man pushes himself into a sitting position and looks up at Daiki with a certain expectation in his eyes, eyes the colour of the sky, the colour of baby blue eyes; the flower, not the real thing.

Daiki knows what the man’s waiting for, but instead of cutting him loose, he hauls him over his shoulder, the same way he did before he almost sent the man to his death. “What are you doing?”

“Got a name, mister?” Daiki asks as he carries the man all the way to his horse that is now a little bit further away than from where he parked it.

The man hesitates but eventually replies. “Tetsuya.  Tetsuya Kuroko.”

Daiki snorts. “That’s a fucking lot of words,” he says, “mind if I call you Tetsu instead?”

“It’s only two,” Tetsuya calmly replies, “and yes, I do mind.”

They reach his horse—Daiki named it Silver for its white hair that borders on being shimmering—and Tetsuya is thrown onto its back. “Got a wife in Armadillo, Tetsu?”

Tetsu stares at Daiki like the latter’s mad. “No.”

“That sucks,” says Daiki. Poor woman’s going to get her heartbroken, and Daiki really dreads being the bearer of grave news. “’Fraid you’re gonna have to stay like that for a while, at least until we reach Armadillo.” Daiki chuckles.

Tetsuy narrows his eyes, unamused. His pale white face turns crimson with all that blood rushing to his head. “I don’t see why you can’t untie me. I can head there myself.”

Daiki guffaws. “Tetsu, I don’t know if you realise this but you were almost killed back then, kidnapped by a cannibal then caught by me. It’s getting dark now, you got a bad leg so I don’t think I can trust you on returning to Armadillo in one piece. Plus, coyotes roam this place at night. Don’t think you fancy being coyote food after almost being cannibal meat, do you?”

“I still don’t see why you can’t untie me.”

Daiki shrugs, securing the last ropes around Tetsu’s frame to keep him from falling off Silver. “There are ways I do things. This is one of them.”

“Then I’d rather you feed me to the coyotes,” Tetsu snaps at him. Daiki ignores him and mounts Silver.

“No can do, mister. Got a code of honour and all that shit. Satsuki will kill me if she finds out.” He takes hold of the reins and casts one look at his passenger, grin on his face. “Getting comfy back there?”

“Fuck you,” Tetsu mutters darkly. Daiki laughs and gently kicks the sides of Silver as they head off to Armadillo.

 

...

 

After, when Daiki’s all washed up and ready to call it a day, there’s a knock on the door. With a groan, he gets up from his bed to walk to the door. He pulls it open and Tetsu’s standing there, looking at him with that chilling calmness.

“What do you want?” Daiki leans his weight against the door, irritated.

“I’ve nowhere to live,” Tetsu replies.

Daiki stares at him incredulously. “What’s it gotta do with me?”

“You brought me here against my will.”

“I brought you home safely, you ungrateful bastard,” Daiki grumbles.

“I’m from Thieves’ Landing.”

 “Then why didn’t you fucking say so?”  Daiki’s shout is loud enough that a few patrons look up from the floor below.

“Shut the fuck up, would you?” Martin the Pianist cries out to him.

“You didn’t ask,” says Tetsu.

“I’m not drunk enough for this shit.” Daiki plants his forehead against the door. “The hell do you want from me, then?”

“A place to stay. Simple as that.”

Daiki chews on the insides of his cheek. He does have an extra bed in the room but sharing a room with a strange stranger sounds very, very stupid, and Daiki’s made _a lot_ of stupid decisions in his life.

Might not hurt to make another one.

He pulls his door back wide enough for Tetsu to enter. “You wake me up in the middle of the night for anything that’s not a fire and I will fucking slit your throat.”

Daiki catches Tetsu nodding before throwing himself onto the mattress and shutting his eyes. He doesn’t know it then, but sometime in the future, a little ways down the road, he’ll look back to this day and thank himself for letting Tetsu in and he will think that he is the best fucking thing Daiki has ever met in his pathetic damn life.


End file.
